Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
The years are going by us like huge birds, whom Doom and Destiny and the schemes of God have frightened up out of some old gray marsh.
Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.
Then I perceived, what I had never thought, that all these staring houses were not alike, but different one from another, because they held different dreams.
Roland of Gilead responded as he ever had and ever would when such useless, mystifying questions were raised: 'Ka.
T[he rules of writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.
Sometimes a homeland becomes a tale. We love the story because it is about our homeland and we love our homeland even more because of the story.
It's fun telling you tall Texas tales. You always look like a little girl who's hearing Cinderella for the first time.
Thus it is with proud silly people, who think themselves above everyone else, and are too proud to ask or take advice.
It is only in the morning that one should marry, read unfavourable reviews, make one's will, beat one's servants, and so forth.
Men like him, the kind of guys who left the womb fighting? They didn’t get fairy-tale endings. They burned bright until they burned out—and he was burning out.
Haunted by demons of the past, hounded by demons not yet met, the nevermore and evermore left her little peace.” ~A Tale of Two Women
Because of my capacity for listening to strangers' tales, or the details of their lives, my patience with their food and their crotchets, my curiosity that borders on nosiness, I am told that anyone traveling with me experiences an unbelievable tediu...
...but which of us has read every line of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or The Divine Comedy, or Paradise Lost? Only men of epic stomach can digest these epic tales.
A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto, . . . not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing.
As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter...
Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered.
Perhaps he was merely being friendly. Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was the cigarette.
I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.
When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
I beliebe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.
